These Battered Hands

by Laurel Ulen Curtis

  “Thank God,” he laughed with a close of his brilliant blue eyes.

  “I just remembered what you told me the first night we came here.”

  “What did I tell you?” he asked, at a loss.

  “You know!”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, Cal.”

  “That you come here to be close to your parents!” I whisper-yelled.

  His eyes widened slightly just as I spewed the rest of my panic. “You don’t think they saw us, do you?”

  “No,” he comforted, wrapping his tan arms around me and squeezing.

  My eyes closed in relief and my head settled onto the perfect pillow of his shoulder.

  “They probably heard you though.”

  “Nik!”

  “I’m just saying,” he teased, and then mouthed, “Loud,” directly against the salty skin of my cheek.

  Feeling properly teased and content, I leaned into him and lie there, counting the stars and the bugs and the times the ocean rolled in and back out again.

  I think I got to a thousand of each before I even considered moving, the late hour of the night and the pull of responsibility making me cringe all the way down to my toes.

  “I just want to live in this moment,” I admitted as we climbed on the back of his motorcycle to go back to the gym for my car.

  I wanted to stay there on that beach with him and spend the night in his arms, and for now it wasn't a possibility.

  I felt trapped by circumstance and freed by feeling.

  I’d never felt this complicated in my life.

  “Calia,” my mom’s soft voice called out of the darkness, sounding like a gunshot in the dead silent house.

  My hand shot to my chest, and I took a panicked step back.

  “Geez! Mom! You scared me.”

  Out of the dark and into the light, she padded softly from her spot in the living room to the opening in the hall. Her nightgown peeked out from underneath her robe, and the satin of her sash tangled loosely at her waist. Her feet were bare, and her long brown hair hung neatly in front of one shoulder.

  She looked largely the same as she did every night, but her face held concern and worry that I wasn’t accustomed to seeing.

  My mom was a good woman. A good nurturer and caretaker and a good wife to my father. What she wasn’t was outspoken.

  She didn’t get involved in my life the way my dad did, but she didn’t stop him either. She just lived her life among us, watching us make decisions and hoping they’d turn out well.

  Until now.

  “Come on,” she worried her lip, grabbing me gently at the elbow and pulling me into a walk. “Let’s go in the kitchen and talk.”

  Her voice was low, and her eyes drifted up the stairs to where my father no doubt lay sleeping. This conversation was meant to be private.

  Unable to deny her something she asked when she asked so little of me, I followed behind her obediently and took a seat at the table when she gestured that I should.

  A pot of coffee sat waiting, and taking two mugs from the cabinet, she poured us each a cup before sitting down.

  Her lips worried between her teeth for several moments, doing nothing but bolstering my own concern to near the point of breaking, before she finally found the courage to speak.

  “I know what’s going on with you, Calia.”

  My throat squeezed at her tone, but I forced myself to speak casually, without hurry, and as innocently as possible. “What’s going on with me, Mom?”

  “No,” she shook her head, gripping her cup with both hands and still speaking in a whisper. “Don’t give me that. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m saying. A mother knows. And you know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  I sank deeper into my chair, thinking about the feel of Nik’s skin on mine and the sand that still clung to my body underneath my clothing.

  Denial hung on the tip on my tongue, but with the feel of him fresh inside me, even desperate, I couldn’t muster up a lie.

  “I see the way he looks at you,” she murmured thoughtfully. “And I see the way you look at him.”

  “Mom—”

  “I get it, Callie,” she interrupted, reaching out to take my hand in hers. “I get how easy it is to get caught up in someone when they’re that caught up in you. I get that you’re plenty old enough, and that you don’t need your momma getting in your business.”

  When I started to exhale in relief, she squeezed my hand in warning.

  She wasn’t done.

  “But I cannot ignore the consequences of this. I can’t sit by and watch you throw away years and years and years of work. Do you realize what you’re doing? What your father will think?”

  “I can’t just stop my feelings,” I argued quietly, feeling my eyes well up. But the tears didn’t fall. No matter how upset I got, they never did. I wanted to blow up. I wanted to cry and rage and argue about how none of it was fair.

  How I didn’t deserve to be punished for wanting to be with someone, for feeling like I’d finally found that thing people are looking for, the person who understood me and trusted me to understand him.

  But I knew no matter how much I vomited my feelings all over the table and my mom, the talk wouldn’t change. She wouldn’t change her opinion completely and my predicament wouldn’t disappear. It was here to stay for the near future, and no matter how angry I got, it wasn’t something I could easily alter.

  “I know,” she agreed with a nod, forgetting her coffee all together and grabbing on to both of my hands tightly. “But can’t it wait until you’re done? You’ve got a month or so until you can retire. Just put it on hold until you’re done, that’s all.”

  God, Nik had asked me for virtually nothing, giving and giving to my needs and foolishness at every turn. All he wanted was me.

  “I don’t want to break his heart,” I admitted to her.

  I didn’t want to break mine, I admitted to myself.

  “He’ll understand. If he cares about you, there’s no way he’d want you to throw everything away that you’ve worked so hard to achieve.”

  Her words were a challenge. She hoped he wouldn’t want me to, but part of her already thought he had asked. Or that he was trying to convince me. Nik was the villain in her scenario. No matter how she looked at it.

  “He would never,” I swore vehemently my voice breaking at the same time that my raw energy made the chair creak below me. He’d been the one to keep me alive, keep me from going so far down the damn rabbit hole that I couldn’t thump my way back out.

  “Then wait,” she urged. “A month. It’s so little time to sacrifice. It can’t be worth it.” She shook her head, convinced. “That amount of time with him cannot be worth the consequences.”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  A lot could happen in the span of a month. I knew that now.

  Because the night had finally caught up with me, and my mind had finally made sense of all that jumble I’d been too scared to sort out before.

  It’d been six weeks of back and forth, but one thing was for sure. I was stuck on Nik like some crazy strength glue, and I didn’t know if it was possible to pry myself off.

  I shrugged, pulled my lips to the side, and admitted one of the scariest possibilities I’d encountered in my entire twenty-six years. “I think I love him.”

  Panic flashed in her eyes, the danger that I was going to turn my entire world upside down burning in her brain. She couldn’t let that happen. Because my world directly related to hers and my father’s.

  “Then think of him, Callie. Your father will fire him.”

  “You’d tell him?”I asked, my voice ringing with hurt and accusation and a tiny bit of uncertainty. I didn’t know what would happen if it came down to that, and I didn’t know if I could handle it when it did.

  She considered it, looking deep into my eyes, and searching them for something.

  When she finally found what she was looking for, her answer came out in a whisper. “No, Callie. You
have my word that I won’t tell him.”

  Air filled my shriveled lungs by extinguishing the blinding weight of my panic.

  “Thank you.”

  “Just consider everything I’ve said,” she urged. “Really think about it.”

  I nodded my acquiescence, and she reached out to pat my hand.

  “Okay,” she murmured, standing from the table and taking her untouched coffee to the sink and pouring it out.

  Without another word, she left the room, tiptoeing up the stairs to avoid the squeaks and leaving me to consider how my world got so confusing.

  Would it really be temporary if I said that word?

  No matter how I spun it, I couldn’t make the ring of finality change. It meant what it said.

  It was what it was—

  Goodbye.

  I’d known we’d have to part ways as she got ready to head for training camp. I knew I wouldn’t be able to talk to her and see her and touch her every day, but I’d expected the send off to go differently than this.

  We were wrapped in each other, and her face was tucked firmly in my throat. It felt real and right—except for the way she shook, chattering in my arms as though she couldn’t control it.

  Her body strung tight to the point of breaking, she squeezed at my waist and tried to burrow closer and closer until finally, all of that tension broke.

  Her body sagged and melted, but it wasn’t in a good way. She didn’t feel closer to me, connected to me, in the moment with me—she felt distant and gone and like she’d finally settled on the wrong side of a decision.

  “We can’t keep doing this.”

  I looked up at the unexpected words and pulled back out of her arms to see her eyes not on me, not open and honest, but on the ground. I kept mine on her and searching, willing her to lift them and look at me on her own. To come back into herself and the connection she knew we had with one another.

  “Can’t keep doing what?” I asked when her eyes refused to meet mine, a lead ball taking over all of the empty space in my stomach.

  I knew where she was going, but some naive part of me hoped I could stop it. That she’d listen to me and herself and realize that each word she spoke came directly out of someone else’s mouth.

  “Us.”

  “Us,” I repeated, rolling the word on my tongue and flicking a tone of disbelief off the tip.

  “Come on, Nik,” she whispered, her tongue flashing out to lick the dry of her lips. “I’m leaving for Olympic training camp. The back and forth, the arguing, all of this…” She pointed between us. “Sleeping with my coach,” she added, her voice hushed even more. “What about all of that seems healthy for focus? People are counting on me.”

  I knew people were counting on her.

  I was one of them.

  But my interest was completely different from everyone else’s.

  Unable to hold my tongue anymore, I asked the unthinkable. Something no person had ever dared to ask an athlete right before they headed to Olympic training camp.

  Was any of it worth it?

  “Why are you still here?” Her muddy, moist eyes jumped to mine in question. I didn’t make her wait. “Still doing this? Because from watching you, from feeling you, I can’t figure it out.”

  Her eyes jumped around furiously, trying to find her clarity, trying to find an answer she’d lost a long time ago, but potential tears never fell.

  “I can’t just be done. I don’t know how I know, but it’s not over. Something is supposed to happen. Something significant.”

  Her words turned desperate, and her tone reeked of pleading. “It has to happen. You don’t swim twenty-one fucking miles across the English Channel just to get in a boat fifty feet from the shore.”

  Accusation bled from her eyes, and distress and desperation morphed to anger. “I can’t quit now.”

  “I’m not telling you to be done.” My mind reeled, and hurt poured around my heart like fresh, wet cement. “Jesus, you think I’d expect that of you?”

  “I don’t know!” she yelled, confused and feeling trapped in her skin. I could see it in the agitated frenzy of her movements and the flush in her chest. She felt like she had no way out, no way to maintain both facets of her life and everything about it killed me.

  It killed me to know she couldn’t commit to something I felt so strongly about.

  But mostly, it killed me to know I couldn’t have her.

  “What am I supposed to think when you say things like that?” she accused.

  That I loved her.

  God.

  That was what she was supposed to goddamn think.

  The words lodged in my painfully clogged throat, and I couldn’t say it though. Not like this, not out of anger or spite or some last ditch effort to control a spiraling situation.

  When I said those words to her, there would be no reproach or consequences. It would be me and her, and she’d damn well know before I said it.

  “I want what you want, Cal. Not what your Dad wants or what’s expected or what you think is the only option. I want you to be fucking happy, and I don’t want it tomorrow or next week or four fucking years from today. I want it now, this moment, and I want it goddamn always.”

  “Goddammit!” she yelled, pulling at the skin of her face and turning away from me. “Why are you so good at putting everything together and making sense with your words when mine get jumbled and confused and come out all wrong all the time?”

  I thought back to the many zingers she’d delivered in the past and couldn’t say that I agreed. I never thought she’d had a problem yelling at me about what she felt, but maybe this was her way of telling me that’s what was happening now.

  I scrubbed a hand down my face and willed myself to calm down.

  “Tell me what’s going on, Cal. You just explain, and I’ll listen.” She turned back to me and her eyes searched mine. “I’ll listen,” I reiterated. “Okay?”

  “I don’t want it to be over,” she whispered her heart splattered plainly across her entire face.

  “Neither do I,” I agreed, coaching myself to keep my spot, my distance, and not pull her into my arms.

  “I just need time.”

  I expelled a heavy breath.

  “Time to go to camp and concentrate on that and nothing else. I can’t think about you or anyone else.”

  All I could bring myself to do was nod, wanting so badly to argue but knowing I’d do anything for her at the same time.

  Even if it meant doing the one thing I had no desire to ever do.

  “I can give you time,” I forced out on a whisper, feeling my jaw hardened with frustration as I said it.

  My words sliced open her chest, letting the relief, air, and bloody evidence of her turmoil spill out all over the place.

  I worked to calm myself, knowing that she relied on me to be the calm one, the collected one—the one who could rationalize that not right now didn’t mean not ever.

  I started to form words several times, but none of them seemed like the right ones. When I finally spoke, it was to spew the only thing I could think to ask that didn’t include begging and a profession of love.

  “You know the exact mileage of the English Channel swim?”

  She was surprised at first, but nearly instantly settled into the escape my simple question provided. She could concentrate on what was coming without me making it even harder for her, and the knowledge of it washed her pretty face with ease.

  I knew I’d done the right thing.

  She waved it off. “I wrote a paper once.”

  Awkward and uncomfortable we stared at one another as she rubbed the fingers of her hands together in anxiety.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, turning to leave without a touch or a hug or a kiss on the lips.

  I’m not.

  I couldn’t change what was happening, but I wouldn’t even if I could. Every moment with her was just a piece of the ultimate puzzle that we’d eventually get solved.

 
I didn’t try to stop her, knowing this wasn’t the end.

  It wasn’t for her, and it wasn’t for me.

  It was just a pause in time.

  Just a little time—

  Off.

  My gymnastics, my mood, my rhythm and tempo, and the way I tumbled—all of it had turned straight to shit.

  Even Beam was feeling and looking wrong, several falls a day clouding my vision and throwing me for a complete loop.

  And Coach Banning, the Olympic Team Coach, had noticed. But she wasn’t the type to yell and demand, and for that I was thankful. Instead, she’d pulled me aside with a kind word—and a kick in the pants. Get doing or get gone. She wasn’t mean, but facts were facts. Girls were lined up across the country just waiting to take my spot, and if I wasn’t cutting the fucking cake, there was no reason to keep me.

  Still, as nice as she was, I didn’t end my talks with her feeling uplifted at all. I felt down and out and on the last leg of survival.

  I always found that to be one of the most interesting things of the Olympic system, having to go from training with someone you know and trust to a stranger for one of the most important events of your life.

  It was practical, that I knew, the impossibility of every individual team member bringing a different coach to the table nearly undeniable, but I still wasn’t a fan.

  The way I felt right now and the intensity with which I wanted my own coach reinforced it—I seriously wasn’t a fan.

  I missed Nik on all of the expected personal levels, but I truly missed him professionally too. He had become the strongest pillar of my support system and my go-to guy for advice. He had a head for the sport—both mentally and physically—and I trusted his instincts implicitly.

  And, as a result, camp as a whole was a struggle.

  I was grouchy and introverted and sullen at all the wrong times.

  Which basically meant all the time.

  The other girls noticed, since living and training and eating and sleeping together made it hard not to, and they tried their best to help. But without the ability to explain, without the comfort of his voice, I hadn’t been able to find any kind of composure. And without those things, they hadn’t been able to find a way through my brittle fucked-up shell.